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“I think your home would have made him cry tears of joy.”
This last observation brought a smile to the man’s lips. I wondered how old he was. Older than thirty, certainly, but not sixty, not yet.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Joe. Joe Oliver. I was told by my friend that you could help me.”
“Oliya?”
“That’s right.”
“She is a real woman.”
I took this compliment of Olo as acceptance and so made my request. “I need a semitransparent face mask, body armor that’s pretty lightweight, and a Welrod with extended clip.”
Primo studied me for a good while, digesting the meaning behind my requests.
“Hollow tipped or armor piercing?” he asked of the pistol’s ammunition.
“Half and half.”
“Explosives?” he wondered, almost idly.
“Too dangerous for bystanders.”
“No rifle?”
“Too obvious.”
Primo Valasquez studied a little more, this time inside his mind.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said at last.
“How do you want it?”
“I’ll send our friend the bank deposit numbers. When I have the money I will have your order delivered.”
“Do you need my size for the body armor?”
“I have eyes, don’t I?”
34.
LEAF WAS WAITING on the other side of the front door of our temporary beach house as I came through.
While studying my face, she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Sure. Were you worried?”
She kissed me, pulled my hair hard, and said, “Of course I was.”
“Ow.”
And then, for a while, we got reacquainted.
That was, I believe, the most fevered period in my life. The broad strokes were there. I knew that I was having too many disparate feelings to be able to understand, clearly, what any particular thing meant. I was in love and feeling unmoored, away from my home. My grandmother was being treated for a disease that had a 100 percent fatality rate just a few years earlier. I would have died for my Grandma B, thrown myself in the Grand Canyon to ensure her life. And I had a job to do, a serious job. This wasn’t taking pictures of illicit affairs or trying to prove that somebody was cheating an insurance conglomerate out of its stolen monies.
On the positive side of the equation, it looked like my grandmother Brenda Naples would live, and Leaf loved me back. The negatives were that the killers would likely escape justice and that I myself might die.
